Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman was born in 1958 in Denver, Colorado and died in New York City in 1981. Woodman's work focuses on the human body in space, in particular the female figure and self-portraiture. She managed to produce a prodigious body of work even in her short lifetime. Since her untimely death at the age of 22 her work has grown in historical importance, coinciding with a period of intensive study from historians of photography, art history, and feminism, and from critical studies that have developed around her work, and photographers who see as prescient her use of the self-portrait to express ideas about the construction of identity and self.   

The first in-depth, critical assessment of her work was organized by Ann Gabhart at Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA in 1986, and was seen at  Hunter College Art Gallery, New York, travelling to Boulder, Irvine, and Champlain, Il.   A show at the Shedhalle Zurich in 1992 toured to Meunster, Stockholm, Helsinki; Berlin, and Norway; and in 2000 a solo exhibition was organized by Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.  A comprehensive show introducing her photographs to a wider public was organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris in 1998, and travelled to Rotterdam; Lisbon; London; Barcelona; Milan; Dublin; and Madrid.

More recent exhibitions have been shown internationally at the following institutions: Fundación Canal, Madrid, Spain (2019); Tate Liverpool, UK (2018); Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, France (2016); Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria (2014); a retrospective that started at the San Francisco Museum of Art, California in 2011 and traveled to the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2012; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2009); and the Tate Modern, London, England (2007).